Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for failover of a virtual function exposed by an SR-IOV adapter.
Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One area of advancement includes data centers providing cloud services with various types of virtualization services. Regardless of the particular type of virtualization service being offered, most virtualization services make use of massive amounts of data I/O traffic and network bandwidth. In such a computing environment, an industry standard specification, SR-IOV (‘Single Root I/O Virtualization’), exists for creating virtual processes that allow for independent access to I/O hardware resources of a shared network device. However, problems still exist in reducing the impact from hardware failures or updates on the hardware being utilized by the virtualization services.